Tony Wilson is dead.

Re-reading those words, I feel a profound sense of sadness. I know that everyone is paying tributes laced with hyperbole at the moment, but it really has affected me in a very important way. I had the pleasure of meeting him a number of years ago at a seminar in Aberdeen. Following a screening of "24 Hour Party People", Mr Wilson took to the stage and shared anecdotes, answered questions, and entertained the audience. Basically, he did a good job of being Tony Wilson. They say you should never meet your heroes, and I guess Tony Wilson is the exception that proves the rule.

The important thing about meeting Tony Wilson is that he fully understood the significance that a twenty something music fan would attribute to such a meeting, and did everything in his power to live up to that. Instead of Tony Wilson: 55 year old family man, business man, and ordinary bloke, he gave us Tony Wilson: music mogul, impresario, raconteur, and genius/idiot. He told me stories that I have heard a hundred times before, but made me feel like I was sharing some important revelation, and that he was confiding in me. He spoke of Ian Curtis in a way that felt like he was unburdening himself of the past, even though I have heard those exact same words many times before. I left our meeting feeling like I was someone special, and that I had met a very important person.

Which I had. If nothing else, Tony Wilson will be remembered for giving Joy Division to the world. No-one else had the foresight to see that the best music is made by artists that need to make music, and by treating it as product and trying to market that product, the overall impact is to destroy the impulse that made the music worthwhile in the first place. Unusually for someone in the music industry, Tony Wilson heard Joy Division, loved them, and allowed everyone else to fall in love with them by letting them do what they wanted to do. Their two albums stand as a testament not only to their genius, but to his; the genius that comes from loving music and knowing what to do with it.

Of course he has had so many other achievements that it seems churlish to focus on Joy Division, but in a sense, when Tony Wilson gave us Joy Division, he changed the world. That’s a big claim, and one that I ultimately feel is justified. After Joy Division, music took on a different palette, and the way we consume music took on a different format. Creatively, the language of music was opened up, and young bands were free to vocalise their emotions in whatever way they wanted to. Darkness took on a romantic grandeur which has forever changed the way that people make music. When Ian Curtis died, music became real for a whole generation, and the unhindered power of music – and the impact it has on people’s lives – was uncomfortably apparent.

And Tony Wilson was the man responsible for it. If Joy Division had been singed to a ‘real’ record label, chances are they would have been polished up, changed, marketed, and sold to us as something we could purchase. Wilson essentially put out their album and said, "I love this music so much, and it’s so important, you NEED to get this because it will change your life as much as it has changed mine." And thus he sealed his reputation as someone who, for all his failings, we all admired and trusted. A man who was happily prepared to stand up and be counted, regardless of what people thought of him. In a sense, he brought the very notion of having a record label, and releasing music, completely up to date. No longer was it some faceless guys in suits singing up bands, drafting contracts, and studying demographics, but instead we had a man who loved music, signed up bands that he was excited by, and created an label identity that was almost as important as the music released. No-one is going to say for one second that all the music Factory records released was brilliant, but the strength of the label identity was – and is – such that it almost seemed that if it was on Factory, it would probably be worth owning. And if nothing else, the sleeve would look good.

Part of his appeal over the years, and something that has kept us coming back to him, long after his musical contributions dried up, is that notion of ridicule that he always set himself up for.

Unlike many others in his position, he was an extremely vocal enthusiast, and seemingly couldn’t stop telling people what he thought. If your band was brilliant to him, he would shout from the roof-tops how good they are. A case in point is the Happy Mondays, a band that initially started out with no promise at all, but through his constant and enthusiastic championing, found the confidence to change the musical landscape. And there’s that notion again: changing the world of music. Wilson managed it a few times, and that’s more than most of us can say.

Ultimately, the impact of Tony Wilson can be summed up by something that he has restated time and time again over the years: when it comes to going with the truth or the legend, go with the legend. He understood the conceited, selfish and indulgent appeal of pop music, and grasped that so comprehensively that everything about him and his record label became legendary. Assigning catalogue numbers to everything under the sun, embarking on schemes so preposterous that even a child would be able to spot the financial pitfalls ahead, releasing brilliant music to a legion of fans that trusted the label implicitly – these are all part of what made the man a legend. And I mean that in the truest sense of the word; of all the things said about Tony Wilson, only he could be certain as to how much of it was true. But he knew that’s what we wanted, and that’s what he gave us.

So now we live in a world without a man like this, and it makes me feel sad. It makes me feel sad because the idea of what he represents no longer exists. Where are the people who actually care about music? I don’t mean all those people who sign record contracts and market stuff so that we can purchase exactly what we’re supposed to like, and I don’t mean all those people out there who strap on a guitar to make money and get their face in magazines. I mean people who go out of their way and over the top just because they love music that much. People who understand history, and myths and style. People like Tony Wilson.

A large part of why we are celebrating this man is because, in the eyes of a lot of people of my generation all over the country, he made his local scene seem important. Wilson was the instigator, the facilitator, and by championing ‘local’ music, he was elevating it to the point where it was no longer just ‘local’, but simply music in its own right. Northern Ireland lacks this. We have scores of ‘local’ bands going round, thinking small, and doing small things, just because there is no reason for them to think otherwise. We need someone who is prepared to put themselves on the line and say, "This is important, and I don’t care what you think." We need someone who is not in it for the money, someone who actually cares about the music. We need someone who cares about Northern Ireland, and isn’t going to run off to London the second something happens.

We need Tony Wilson…